Opening America's Market: U.S. Foreign Trade Policy since 1776 Book

Despite the passage of NAFTA and other recent free trade victories in the United States, former U.S. trade official Alfred Eckes warns that these developments have a dark side. Opening America's Market offers a bold critique of U.S. trade policies, concentrating on the evolution of those policies over the last sixty years and placing them within a broad historical perspective. While many believe the Unites States rose to world leadership on the strength of its commitment to free trade, Eckes shows the facts are quite different.

Eckes also challenges criticisms of the "infamous" protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, which allegedly raised tariffs to record levels, worsened the Great Depression, and provoked foreign retaliation. In trade history, he says this episode was merely a mole hill, not a mountain.